Developing a Novel Citizen-Scientist Smartphone App for Collecting Behavioral and Affective Data from Children Populations

The paradigm of citizen-science, i.e., scientific research that is conducted in whole or in part by non-professional scientists, has gained popularity lately, e.g., for the purpose of crowdsourced data collection. Smartphones with their abundance and ubiquity are perfectly suited and have been widely used for crowdsourced data collection in real life settings. The ongoing, EC-funded research programme named BigO exploits the citizen-science paradigm to collect behavioral (eating, sleeping and physical activity) and affective (mood) data from children populations by means of a novel smartphone application with the intention of developing a decision support system to assist public health authorities in effective policy making against childhood obesity. This paper presents the development – in the context of BigO – of the myBigO app, one of the first citizen-scientist smartphone applications addressed to children for behavioral and affective data collection. This includes the design, implementation, and deployment of myBigO app in a number of data collection studies as well as its preliminary evaluation with respect to technical robustness and user experience in the context of these studies.